When I grew up, home video was pretty much a rich person's game where it existed atall, so the concept of watching movies repeatedly wasn't really an option unless they were ones that got regular screenings on TV, like The Ten Commandments (which I loved) or The Sound of Music (which I didn't).

We got a VCR when I was around 13 or so, but we almost never bought movies; we pretty much used it to record stuff off of TV or to rent movies from the video store.

The movie FROM my childhood that I've probably seen the most number of times, though, or is probably Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (and on top of that, in a charmingly old-school tactic, when I was little we would put a tape recorder next to the TV and make audiotapes of favorite Christmas specials and such, and then listen to those if we had to stay home sick from school - Willy Wonka was maybe the only full-length movie we had on tape, and I listened to it a ton of times as a kid).

Like Jason, we didn't get a VCR until I was about twelve or 13 - and then it was to tape stuff for one the kids' wards at the local hospital (my brother had leukemia, and got better - yay!) - so I think the only movie I watched somewhat regularly before I'd turned 15 was the 1982 version of Ivanhoe (with Anthony Andrews, Sam Neill, John Rhys-Davis, and Julian Glover), which is shown on Swedish TV every New Year's Day.

Hmmmmmmmmm... I remember seeing For your eyes only a number of times as well. Still, that's only five or so. We did rent a LOT of movies, to the point that we got christmas cards from the video store and had a hard time finding new stuff.

If On Her Majesty's Secret Service is NOT your vote for the best, why not? (Other than the cop-out "Connery started it and is teh Roxxor").

My vote for best is currently a toss-up between Goldfinger and Skyfall.

Goldfinger because this is the one where all the pieces of the early incarnation of Bond falls into place - Connery is at his most comfortably rakish, you've got a good soundtrack with a great title song (F~&* yeah, Shirley Bassey) that would influence Bond-songs all the way up to Goldeneye, the villain has a ridiculous plot - but it's one that makes sense within the world of the movie, and Oddjob is one of the great henchmen - gimmicky, but not silly.

Skyfall because it has the most intense opening of all the Bond movies, because it's the best-looking of all the movies - great locations like the main villain's home base or the London below London (not to be confused with the London Underground or London Below) or the lightscape of the Shanghai skyscrapers, because the beautiful cinematography (Shanghai again, the signal flare fired off under the ice), because of the way it so seamlessly ties together the old and the new of the franchise in a way they tried and utterly failed to do with Die Another Day, and finally, because of the top-notch acting from all the main characters down to Naomie Harris as Eve and Ben Whishaw as Q. And finally, finally, because the end is Home Alone: MI6.

For me, OHMSS isn't because I just don't buy Lazenby as James Bond. Other parts of the movie are fine - Telly Savalas as the villain, the stunts and sets, the locations, the women - I just found Lazenby flat and charisma-less. In a movie where the main character is supposed to be arrestingly owning the screen, Lazenby just never did. If James Bond is weak, a James Bond movie is going to be weak.

Other things can sink a Bond movie (Moonraker, for instance, for being so laughably awful that it took me three separate partial viewings to get all the way through it because I got to the point where I just couldn't take it anymore and needed a break, but I was determined to get all the way through it), but OHMSS managed the trick of being a decent spy movie but a lame Bond movie for me.

FWIW, my favorite Bond movie is still Goldfinger, though I'd put Craig's Casino Royale and Skyfall up with any of the classics (I should say that, unlike Kajehase, I found Die Another Day pretty entertaining).

I'll leave out Bourne Identity, because the movie shared nothing with the novel except the title, so it's not really an "adaptation."

But let me say that Jackie Brown should have been the best movie ever -- Rum Punch is my all-time favorite Elmore Leonard novel, and I'm a huge Tarantino fan, and I love DeNero, etc., and I was totally into his "porting" Blaxploitation queen Pam Grier into the mix -- but somehow the whole thing fell flat.